Star Wars Rebels

But we already caught a glimpse of Old Ben in action during his long, desert watch of young Luke Skywalker in season 3 of the animated series Star Wars: Rebels, which comes out on Blu-ray Aug. 29.

In this making-of video from the season 3 set, we see that the show used elements of the performances of both McGregor and Guinness to create this new fight sequence – with voice provided by Star Wars stalwart Stephen Stanton, who also voices Grand Moff Tarkin on the series and supplied Churchillian gruffness to Admiral Raddus in Rogue One.

There’s even a little of Kenobi’s old trainer, Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn, thrown into his fighting style.

Disney/Lucasfilm

The episode featured something Star Wars fans have been waiting to see for many years: At long last, the gray-bearded Kenobi was tracked down by his long-ago nemesis – the snarling, black-and-red tattooed Darth Maul.

Those who only follow the movies might be mistaken in thinking that Maul ended when he was sliced in half by Ewan McGregor’s young Kenobi at the end of The Phantom Menace, but the animated shows from executive producer Dave Filoni tell us that Maul actually survived to fight again – for many years, actually.

First, in The Clone Wars show, he was a kind of crazed halfling with mechanical arachnid legs replacing his lower half, then he was given more humanoid prosthetics, and went on a decades-long mission of revenge against both the remaining Jedi and the Sith who had abandoned him.

It all culminated in the episode “Twin Suns,” with a campfire showdown on Tatooine when Luke was still an unaware farmboy in his early teens. By then, Ben Kenobi had taken on the Alec Guinness look we know from the original trilogy.